Old Rottenhat

Dondestan (Revisited)

The eccentric singer-songwriter has some of his key solo LPs reissued, including the essential Rock Bottom.

Every decade or so, Robert Wyatt's discography comes around again; this new batch of reissues (the first of two) has apparently been prompted by the release of For the Ghosts Within a few weeks ago. Any excuse will do, really. The albums Wyatt has intermittently released over the past 40 years are glacially paced and occasionally maddening, but they're also fascinating, thoughtful, and spectacularly beautiful at times. He's also got one of the great singing voices in Anglophone pop, as high, lonesome, and weathered as the cliffs of Dover, whether he's crooning the politicized lyrics he favors or being a scat-singing "human horn."

1974's Rock Bottom wasn't Wyatt's first solo album-- that was 1970's long-out-of-print The End of an Ear-- but it was the first record of the second act of his career: In 1973, the wildly energetic former drummer of Soft Machine (and leader of Matching Mole) broke his spine in an accident. He spent eight months in the hospital, reinventing himself as a singer/keyboardist and reworking some pieces he'd already composed for what would have been his new band.

The six songs of Rock Bottom were a new kind of music for Wyatt: very slow, exquisitely deliberate. (It's easy to hear echoes of the album in latter-day Radiohead, among others.) The magnificent "Sea Song" is the most immediately gripping piece here, but everything has peculiar little joys that take their time emerging. "Alifib" is an aphasic love song to his partner Alfreda Benge (they were married the day the album was released); "Alife" brings her in to offer an affectionate rebuke. And Wyatt effectively ducks out of his own album a few minutes before it ends: "Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road" concludes with a peculiar three-minute recitative by Ivor Cutler.

That kind of abdication of the spotlight carried over to Rock Bottom's 1975 sequel, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, almost entirely music composed by other people (with occasional lyrics by Wyatt)-- it includes pieces by expatriate South African trumpeter Mongezi Feza ("Sonia", on which Feza himself plays), Charlie Haden, and Jacques Offenbach. The eight-and-a-half-minute "Team Spirit" is sung from the point of view of a soccer ball; "Soup Song" is a rewritten version of the jolly stroll "Slow Walkin' Talk", from the repertoire of Wyatt's mid-60s band the Wilde Flowers, now featuring very silly lyrics from the point of view of a ham hock.

Wyatt kept a fairly low profile over the next five years or so: He sang on a handful of Michael Mantler's projects and played a little on Brian Eno's Before and After Science and Music for Airports, but that was about it. ("I am a real minimalist, because I don't do very much," he once noted.) So the material that ended up on 1982's Nothing Can Stop Us was a surprise. Most of the album collects a series of four brilliant cover singles Wyatt recorded in quick succession in early 1980. He turns Chic's "At Last I Am Free" into a prayerful drone, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet's "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'" into a woozy a cappella reappraisal of wartime communism, and Ivor Cutler's "Grass" into a comment on ideology (played with a Bengali group called Dishari who got the B-side to themselves). There's also a heartfelt version of the socialist standard "Red Flag", and one original, "Born Again Cretin".

A venomously sarcastic, bluntly political song, it pointed the way toward 1985's Old Rottenhat, which genuinely is a solo record--Benge appears for four seconds, and other than that it's wall-to-wall Wyatt. The opening "Alliance" is an attack on politicians who sell out the Left ("You say you're self-sufficient/ But you don't dig your own coal"); "The United States of Amnesia" concerns the "Aryan empire" forgetting its massacre of natives. There's some nifty songwriting here--"The Age of Self" is one of Wyatt's most winning melodies--but the album's on-the-fly production and chintzy keyboard presets make the album sound like a preliminary demo rather than something meant to be listened to.

That problem is redoubled with Dondestan-- whose title means, essentially, "nowhere," as in "¿dónde está?" It was first released in 1991, then remixed and resequenced in 1998 as Dondestan (Revisited), the version included in the new reissues. Apparently the record that inspired the practice of "Wyatting" (going to one of those pub Internet jukeboxes that has a million available tracks and playing something that totally kills the mood), it's a bit livelier than Old Rottenhat, sometimes not in a good way: The title track grinds a nagging piano melody into the dirt for five minutes, and "Shrinkrap" is, yes, a rap about going to therapy. Wyatt's voice continued to get richer and craggier with age; as he joked in the liner notes of Nothing Can Stop Us, "a hesitant beat there, a dodgy note there... are of course entirely deliberate and reproduced as evidence of my almost painful sincerity." But not many people would have guessed from Dondestan that a lot of Wyatt's best music was still ahead of him.